Kathleen Remembers: Length-Invariant One-Shot Recall Without Attention
Recurrent, attention-free sequence models share a structural weakness: a fading state cannot perform exact recall of something seen once, far in the past. We add to the Kathleen trunk a second memory layer -- a "notebook": a fixed-key holographic (HRR) associative store with a learned local write gate, a self-gating raw read, and write-triggered forgetting -- 25K parameters that attach to the logits of any trunk. (1) Mechanism: on a controlled needle-in-haystack task the notebook reaches 80-82% one-shot recall at 4x the training length, where the bare trunk scores ~4% and a parameter-matched attention head scores 100% inside its training length and 0% beyond it. Addressing is length-invar...
| Authors | George Fountzoulas |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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